


Antiquity

by inK_AddicTion



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: F/F, Robots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-10-18 23:48:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 9,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10627737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inK_AddicTion/pseuds/inK_AddicTion
Summary: Living on the highly technologically advanced planet Cygni IV, three human sisters struggle to navigate their relationships and increasing obsoleteness.





	1. Chapter 1

_Picture this._

_There is a planet hidden in a star cluster far distant from our Earth, hidden by the noxious gases of pollutant. A post-industrial world, the great warehouses are crumbling and empty. Ancient ships, salvaged of their parts and stripped of their dignity, rot in abandoned docks. But that is the undercity, the poisoned earth over which smooth green towers and tubes run, the arteries leading up to the pumping heart - the Circle of Governing upon Cygni IV._

_Picture this._

_A clerk hurries down the glowing halls of the Circle; her skin is the carefully applied yellow of bionics. Cybernetic enhanced humans work the new docks with ease, mechanical limbs replacing mechanical hearts. In a busy tube, a bullet train pulsing down the smooth track to the heart of the Tradesdistrict in the Belt, a small human clutches the bars for the swaying passengers, crowded amongst whirring robotic bodies in varying stages of technological decomposition._

_Picture this._

_The small girl, powder-blue of hair and skin, bundled thick in concealing jumpers to hide human limbs, stumbling against a young child of five or six, already with his first pair of cybernetic arms, still sharp from the box. The delicate human skin scrapes on the metal. Blood wells - the child screams. Around, the passengers crowd away, repulsed. The tube’s door hisses open. The human stumbles out, and runs._

* * *

Blue Pearl liked antiques. There was something calming in the familiar musty smell of the old shop, even when her throat was tight and her heart pounded. The dusty shapes of dimly lit antiquities loomed warm and near out of the darkness, the gleams of old Terran titanium tubing, the glossy lacquers of synthetic wood. She was one of their kind.

There was something reverential in brushing her fingers over a survivor of a bygone age, whether they were ancient, filmy holodiscs (smooth and silky like the polished flash of a silver gold statue from the age of moon-worship) or rusted salvage cannibalised from an old starship, greasy and crumbling with age (Blue was continually fascinated by the black dust rubbed off on her fingers, like grave-soil). Perhaps that was why Blue always gravitated towards the decommissioned robot at the far back of the shop, shoved in the side to silvered mirrors with their gilt frames all hidden under the disfiguring shrouds like corpses.

Blue knew the way to sneak back there, quiet as a mouse, in order to steal a few breathlessly unobserved moments with the great behemoth under her shroud. On Cygni IV, snatched moments of privacy were as rare as they were tantalising. Blue would stare at the impression of eyesockets under the dusty blue shroud and study what little she could see. There was a fine-boned hand bigger than Blue’s head resting nearly out of sight, placed on the robot’s knee. She sat in a permanent slump, and yet still towered over the puny concoctions of glass and metal that reflected her silently hulking form a thousand times over. The air tasted faintly of old industrial fluid, oil, plastic, choking dead dust.

Blue would stare at the raw power of this machine, created during an age when industrial workers had yet to stop resembling humans, before technology raped biology and produced a race of enhanced mechanical hearts to which biology was an amusing whimsy of the past. And Blue would fantasise about having the bravery to lift the hood and see the face that they had given this old relic that captured her imagination so intensely as something like herself.

Blue and her sisters were pure humans, engineered to be lean and musical, attributes that had become useless when first her parents and then their fortune had dwindled, died, and disappeared. Left behind in a world that she was too outdated to access, Blue had become antique, just like the hooded robot. She had never plucked up the courage to lift the hood.

But today, with blood on her hand and heart beating fast, hot and sharp with the encounter on the tube, the silent disgust at the messiness of Blue’s humanity, she did.

Her trembling fingers had touched the dusty material with all the tenderness of a false lover. With an abrupt jerk, she tore it away and stood still coughing in the cloud of dust that billowed around her. Eyes watering, Blue stared up into the face of the robot and waited for some profound feeling of philosophical resolution.

It didn't come.

The robot’s face was perfectly human. She had two closed eyes, the colour of bruised forget-me-nots, a high and proud nose suitable for an empress, lips lined with tiny cracks like meanders in river-bends. Synthetic hair, left to grow, hung straight and narrow like nightfall around the implacable face.

Strangely disappointed, Blue recovered the robot and retraced her steps. The shop’s bell tinkled as she left.

Alone in the darkness under the cloth, the robot’s fingers twitched.


	2. Chapter 2

_Picture this._

_The structure of Cygni IV swarms like a tiered beehive. The Queen entombs herself in gold in the Circle, and green-gold plateaus level off from that great heart. First the Tiers, then the Belt (throbbing groin of Cygni IV, ships shooting from the pointed piers, shops stacked teetering narrow on top of each other, like matchstick games), then the Hives, and the Unders, closest to the seas of fumes rolling undisturbed in the dead heart of the undercity._

_Picture this._

_A swift train sweeps down from the Belt and collects its shipload of passengers. A human, scraped hand stuffed in a pocket, bags a silent corner of mutterers. The train loses beauty as it goes, the gold melting off the tracks as they wander into the dark, narrow streets of the Undersquarter. The human, head bowed narrowly, squirms off amid the sharp gleaming bodies of tired workers._

_Picture this._

_The human presses a scarf up against her nose and runs from street lamp to street lamp. A rickety building hunches out of the smog, its depths descending into the poisoned undercity. A stair has been built, a red lantern placed invitingly in a window, shedding its crimson light over the steel grate._

* * *

“I'm waiting for a client,” said Blue’s sister Pearl awkwardly when Blue silently let herself in.

In the darkness of the hallway, Blue tipped her head up to meet Pearl’s pale blue eyes. They looked richer in the dark. She smelled faintly of roses and patchouli, and she'd dressed up in a thin jumpsuit that left her arms and calves tantalisingly bare, smooth human skin milky in the light. A long sash was knotted around her waist, various tools poking out of the impromptu toolbelt. Pearl had always been best at this sort of thing, even back when she'd still let them call her White, before she'd ran away with a stranger that needed fixing.

Blue said nothing. Pearl swallowed, her skilled fingers fidgeting with each other. “It's Garnet,” she said, as if this should inform Blue of something.

Blue kept away from Pearl’s job. No one in their right mind would hire a pure human for the work Pearl did, so Pearl worked in a quiet, off-the-books, illegal sort of way. Blue knew better than to interfere with what she had going for her.

“The Chief of the Peace,” explained Pearl hurriedly. “Enhanced senses-”

“I'll stay in my room,” Blue said quietly. It wasn't hers, nothing in the squalid rooms Pearl squatted in was. Blue was only a visitor, temporary and transient, fading on her sister's thin hospitality.

Pearl looked relieved. “She comes back more often than she needs to,” she offered, as both apology and explanation.

Blue nodded. After a moment, Pearl sighed and stepped aside to let Blue pass her in the narrow hallway, through the lounge into the two doors that branched off into separate sleeping quarters.

Blue crossed to the rumpled bed that still smelt faintly of someone else's perfume, eased herself down, never quite able to rid herself of feeling of intrusion upon the previous inhabitant’s space. The cloying smell of roses surrounded her, a mixture of sickly sweet and flowery that reminded Blue of her sister. The room itself was the biggest in Pearl’s creaky old apartment, yet as far as Blue knew, Pearl never went into it, as thick layers of dust coated the carpet and generous furniture, and the air of the room tasted stale and disused. Dead, with the aftermath of importance, as if something world-changing had happened here, long forgotten and buried under the dusty junk.

She'd come to stay with her sister on Cygni IV to try to sort out her life, stop the directionless drift that had consumed her for so long and find something new. Something to make an outdated and antique self useful in a world that technology had left behind. With Pearl, in her rattling tomb of unused wires and metal that reeked of oil and roses, Blue felt like a wan ghost, pressed thin into someone else’s life.

She sighed quietly, hearing the door open and the rumble of voices through the thin walls. The shuffle of footsteps; the click of the table lamp turning on. Pearl’s laugh. It was fake, slightly strained, but the client evidently didn't know the difference, because a soft chuckle joined her.

Blue dragged the covers up over her bony shoulders and fumbled in the humid darkness for the little communit that Yellow had pressed into her hand before she'd left Yellow’s bright, stark quarters in the Circle of Governing on her way to the dimness of the Undersquarter. Blue hadn't seen her in too long, and her last memory was of sharpness and silence, Yellow's bitterness. She had vehemently disagreed with Blue coming to stay with Pearl.

She dialled Yellow in silence and waited for the connection to come through before she allowed the call to go visual, a small hologram of her sister’s pinched face appearing, a blaze of greenish lime light over the dips and hillocks of the covers in the darkness.

“Blue?” There were a thousand sentiments in the one word.

Blue pressed her finger to her lips. Yellow shared Pearl's garrulity, but unlike Pearl, she sometimes listened.

Yellow’s lips pursed. She nodded. She had clearly answered the call at work, because as Blue stayed quiet, she turned her head to read emails on a screen. The soft tapping of keys reached through the communit. Behind her, Blue could glimpse the feet of the great golden statue that loomed over everyone in Circle.

She watched her sister’s face in silence, feeling a great contentment well up within her. Yellow was frowning the way she did when a particularly troublesome call caught her attention, stiff and haughty brows pulled down, thin-lipped with disapproval. And tenseness, too. Blue wondered if Yellow knew she had forgiven her for their quarrel before Blue had even fully left.

Blue clicked her tongue softly against her teeth, and Yellow’s attention immediately turned to her. Blue mouthed a word. Yellow’s golden eyes softened behind the flickering hologram, and her fingers loomed large as she reached to touch the communit. Blue reached up in turn, flesh meeting hologram for half a second before the call disconnected.

The darkness returned. After a moment, Blue rolled silently to her feet, padding her way through the dark to the door that separated her from the lounge. It opened soundlessly, and Blue, shamelessly, watched.

The table light was on; its harsh glare sliced the room narrowly into two sides of flat white light and deep featureless black. Pearl’s client sat opposite her with her synthetic hands spread, palms up to display the charge units in each. The client’s tall body loomed away into the darkness, until all Blue could discern of her face was the reflection of a visor and craggy clefts of shadows like a far distant mountain range. In the brilliant white circle of light, Pearl’s skin was translucent, and her tools gleamed with the sharpness of a surgeon’s as she poked about the dense, uncovered tangle of wires in the cyborg’s hands.

Blue pressed herself between the hodgepodge stacks of circuitry and miscellaneous technology that abounded in Pearl’s home. Quietly, she held her breath and watched. She did not want to interrupt.

They were talking. Pearl’s client Garnet had a soft, deep voice, quietly authoritative. Pearl’s tutored affectations sounded almost anachronistic to her client.

“There now,” Pearl was saying. “Can you feel that?”

The cyborg’s left-hand twitched in response to whatever Pearl was doing. "Yes.”

“You know what is causing this?” Pearl demanded. She didn't stop to let the cyborg respond. "Hammering away with your gauntlets all day, hardly even stopping to charge. If you don't charge, some of your processes start to shut down. You need to take better care. I was able to fix the damage this time, but what about next time, and the time after-?”

“I have the utmost confidence in your abilities, Pearl,” said the cyborg, soft and rather intent.

“Garnet, you're making easily avoidable mistakes. I refuse to believe that you are unaware of the importance of charging-”

The cyborg Garnet allowed Pearl to rant on for far longer than Blue could have endured. Pearl was getting increasingly technical in her explanations and settled into the rhythmic, lecturing tone Blue remembered so well from her childhood, filling the long dreaded dark with facts and dates, like it would keep the monsters away. Pearl had a memory for those sorts of things. Garnet interrupted instead.

“Pearl, "she said, "I value your professional opinion.” Lightly, she caught hold of Blue’s sister’s wrists, stopping her short.

Pearl’s flush was pale in the flagrant table light, but it was there. She swallowed. "I just want you to take better care of yourself,” she muttered, trying unsuccessfully to pull her hands away.

The cyborg Garnet held on for a moment longer, then slowly her hands released Pearl. Blue abruptly understood that this was how she kept her clients. Teased them - drew them in with glimpses of human flesh that both fascinated and repelled. Bitterness crept up inside of her. Pearl had never feared the coming of the dark like Blue had learnt to.

Garnet hesitated, and although in the harsh light from the merciless white glare her face was hidden, Blue perceived the shift in her body. A sudden chill swept down Blue’s spine, and she knew that she had been spotted. Panic and guilt suddenly flared, and Blue quelled a vibrant sickness. She trembled back against the cluttered walls, a hard ridge of metal poking her skinny shoulderblade. If she kept still, and quiet, it would be fine.

Standing, Garnet’s manner instantly became businesslike. "Payment,” she said curtly, "will be wired to you by this time tomorrow.”

Pearl rose too, evidently aware of the change of mood. She began ushering her client to the door, calling out not quite humorous pleas for Garnet to spread the word of her services amongst her friends who didn't mind paying cheap for an unaugmented human technician. As they left the room, Blue breathed a shaky sigh of relief and hurried noiselessly to the spare room she was sleeping in. Once the door had closed behind her, Blue rested against it, reaching up to scrub her eyes.

The image of the robot’s face was burned into her retina, a chilling memory. Accompanying that ancient, dusty face was her sister’s skin, pale and white in the table light. This was what their forefathers had made them, the robot and her, broken things - curiosities, to be collected. Antiques.

Well, find something in Cygni IV's dim and murky underbelly she had, even if it was just a broken robot in an antique shop.


	3. Chapter 3

_Picture this._

_The everlasting mustard dimness of Cygni IV is spangled with glowing lime lamps that cast dim halos of psychedelic colour against the golden walls of houses. Some, well into their rest cycles, charge undisturbed with the lights down low - or sleep, if they are human enough._

_Picture this._

_Nighttime traffic loops on, grinding away in the weariness, stuffed with passengers too poor to keep to a circadian rhythm. The Belt is alive, vibrant deals done in the dusk under the saffron cloudy sky. The Unders is dark and lonely, as always, metallic faces skittering from the lime lights._

_Picture this._

_In the hazy condensation, a shuffled figure stoops and slumps. It is bowed and bent double like a crippled crone, and cloth covers it head to toe, splashed in grime. The figure painfully claws itself to a lopsided building with an inviting red light and a smear of blood on the steel grate steps._  

* * *

 

Blue startled awake sometime after midnight. It was full night on Cygni IV, and the distant lights of hovercraft speeding overhead made vivid, garish shadows race over the walls, there, then gone, like lightning strikes. The whole world hummed and murmured the sounds of technology, postal drones zipping from house to glowing house, passenger walkways groaning to themselves as they churned on in an endless conveyor belt loop. Across the hall, Blue could hear Pearl welding something - possibly another of those illegal repairs that helped keep the roof over her head. No one in their right mind would hire a pure human technician - not unless they had something else to offer. The margin for human error was just too large.

Blue lay frozen, possessed by the strange feeling of being watched. In the dark, the towering piles of mechanical junk precariously balanced against one another gained a new menacing shapes – a stooped figure there, a hulking monster there… With a soft gasp of fright, Blue tugged the blankets, reeking of flowery fragrance, over her nose.

Instinctively, her fingers twitched for the hand of her sister. But Yellow wasn't here and Blue was alone.

Blue knew that bad things happened in the dark. This was how it started, this was how it always started. A watching presence, silence, oppressive darkness.

The flashing of the hovercrafts continued. The lights blazed and whirled, skittering over the sharp-edged junk monsters and making gleaming silver eyes pop out of the dark. Rattling plumbing kicked into gear somewhere; Blue could hear the clugging of the pipes, like trains thundering over the tracks. Behind the thin, overpoweringly fragrant coverlet, Blue’s eyes tracked the flashes on the walls. The space between her shoulderblades itched and burned feverishly. There were eyes, as tangible as brushing fingers piercing to raw nerves under the skin. Fear trapped her as stiff as a marionette.

The building suddenly juddered and groaned. Blue jumped, burrowing further under her covers. The building settled sometimes, Pearl had told her that it was nothing to be afraid of. Somewhere, there was a clicking, a mechanical whirr. A pale blue light penetrated the covers. Blue stuffed her fist in her mouth.

 There was a muted thud against the window, too close to be anything than what it was – a wet fist colliding with glass. The second echoed wetly through the darkness, causing plumes of dust to haze down from the stacks of forgotten circuitry. Somewhere, Blue’s mind was screaming at her body to run, but it had locked up, in terror, hiding as a tiny little lump under the blankets.

A taut silence followed. Blue barely realised that the sound of Pearl welding had stopped.

A shadow passed over the window, then a thunderous crash exploded through half the wall. Someone screamed, and prismatic shards of glass shot through the darkness, the smog-choked air billowing through the window. Metal groaned and twisted, and the building rattled. Pearl’s footsteps drummed on the floor and the door flung itself open with a crash. Splinters rained down from the ceiling.

There was a raspy wheeze just above Blue’s head. She didn’t dare look up, but she could hear it, could feel the terror drenching down her spine. The raspy drag of cloth tearing on broken glass fragments. Thud. The click and whirr of robotics. Scrape. The mattress dipped suddenly. Blue stayed quiet and still and good. Cloth fell, reeking of dust and oil, and mixed with the sickly sweet perfume. Blue, rigid, felt something wet on her cheek, hidden by the stuffy coverlet. A large hand, trembling and sticky with coppery wetness, slid one finger under the coverlet, as carefully as a knife under the flap of an envelope.

Blue held still as her safety was lightly, delicately peeled away. A gust of cold air brushed her cheeks, soothing. With a startled gasp, she opened her eyes and met the frigid stare of the antique robot. Her eyes were deep and glassy and shining like the dazzled heart of a glacier – and about as forgiving. The robot blinked, deliberately. One lid was a half-second slower than the other, and Blue could hear a faint robotic whirr as she did so.

There was a leaden pause. Blood was dripping slowly down the robot’s huge cheek, following the curve of her neck. Blue’s heart pounded in a chest, throbbing in her pulse point like prey. She wanted to cry, but the sobs were trapped somewhere in her throat, and all Blue could do was offer a choked sort of gasp, her lips quivering. The stuffy night air was blowing in from the huge hole the robot had torn in the wall to get to her, nasty and fouled with smoke. Blue began to have difficulty breathing. Or perhaps it was just hyperventilation setting in.

The robot’s dark mouth moved in numb automatic motions, like a baby searching for the nipple. Ancient vocal cords clicked and whirred somewhere in the dark blue throat, and a static-fuzzed voice spoke, strangely affected but still understandable, _“33-55-67-11. 33-55-67-11. 33-”_

Blue stared at her as the papery whispering, frantic with some sort of terrible urgency, continued to seep, a little gurgling, from the dusty mouth, the clicking tongue. She was missing three teeth, Blue saw. There was blood all over her. _Oh God. Oh God._ There was gristle between her teeth, Blue thought she could see a fragment of bone puncturing the robot’s cheek, creating the odd, whistling sound as she tried to talk.

Dark spots whirled before Blue’s eyes and she sucked in a gasp of the cloying, acrid air. Her eyes burned, but she could still make out a watery pale shape creeping around to the robot’s left.

The robot leaned down, suddenly, and her damp, sticky coils of hair fell around Blue, smearing blood on the bedsheets. Her eyesockets were bigger than Blue’s head, and they glowed with an unnatural azure light, cold and pulsating and alien. And still, that crackling whisper came, fraught with urgency. 

 _“33-55-67-11,”_ the robot whispered to Blue, who stared back, half-compelled to reach up towards the lifeless flesh, as if the robot were a human to be consoled, to be understood. Teetering on the brink of understanding, Blue put her tiny human hand on the bridge of the robot’s nose, feeling the wetness of the blood on her palm, wanting to ease her urgency without knowing why. _“33-5-“_

Suddenly, with an almighty _clang,_ Pearl walloped the robot over the head with a spanner. The light in the robot’s eyes died and she shut down instantly, the cloth veil sinking down over her face.

Blue lay still, heart hammering. A droplet of blood dripped from the robot’s cheek onto her own, like a tear. Almost an entire minute had passed before Blue drew in enough breath to scream. 


	4. Chapter 4

_ Picture this. _

_ A pale anxious face peers out of the reinforced plexiglass of the train window, surrounded by round oval faces. Everyone on this train has a artificial appearance, rubber-jointed, charge-units flickering and glowing as busy important people make notes, caught in an unending stream of first-class work, polite food carts making their way down the narrow corridor between the seats, gleaming wires left indecently exposed to make the mouth water. _

_ Picture this. _

_ The train winds its way down from Circle, down from the clean and efficient Tiers, disgorges its passengers and takes on a shabbier bunch. A buttercup-yellow scarf wrapped around a rubbery-artificial neck glitters and hazes like fool's gold, catching the eyes of the others, pinched and hungry and starved – something they'd steal for its brightness if yellow wasn't such a colour of dirtiness on Cygni IV. _

_ Picture this. _

_ The yellow scarf flaps in the wind of the anxious face's passage, a bright gold streamer through the deserted dimness of Undersquarter. Irregular patches of blood and huge dusty footprints track the way to the building, leaning aslant with its face crumbling, punched-out teeth of masonry scattered every which way. The red light still glows, invitingly, and the yellow scarf blots it as it whips past, briefly. _

* * *

The door burst open and Blue’s sister Yellow ran in, a golden scarf flung haphazardly around her neck slipping off one shoulder. “Blue?!”

“Took you long enough!” Pearl sniped from her position next to Blue, arm awkwardly over her shaking sister’s shoulder.

“I came as quickly as I could,” Yellow hissed. Her animosity gave way to concern when she saw the state Blue was in, and she rushed to her. Pearl relinquished her place swiftly, eager to reassert her distance.

“I’m going to take a look at that thing,” she said, hesitating only briefly before turning her back on Blue and Yellow and disappearing into the smashed spare room.

“Good riddance,” muttered Yellow, then tucked her arm around Blue and pulled her close. “Hey there, baby-Blue, it’s all okay, I’m here.”

Her breath hitching in a silent, panicked sob, Blue clutched onto her and buried her face against the dark, expensive fabric of Yellow’s pea coat. She smelt of face cream and cosmetics, and her bare hand, when Blue gripped it tightly, felt vaguely rubbery. Blue’s shaking fingers worried relentlessly at the wrist of the latex glove Yellow wore, and she clutched hard onto her, until the fake charge-unit on Yellow’s chest bruised her cheek.

“Hey, baby-Blue,” Yellow cooed, “open your eyes, baby-Blue, come back out of your head.”

Awkwardly, Yellow stretched out and felt around the table. The lamp clicked on, and violent light drove back the dark. Shuddering, Blue’s eyes flew open, and her fingers dug convulsively into the faded further of the sofa, hastily cleared of leaking machinery that had stained it intermediate shades of grey and brown. Around them, the green grey towers dominated the room like crumbling cliff faces.

“That’s better,” murmured Yellow. “Bad things happen in the dark.”

Usually, Blue nodded. She took in a steadying breath and rubbed futilely at her wet cheeks. The looming shadow of the robot was behind the eyes, icy stare chilling her down to the vulgarly human heart in her chest. Those numbers rattled around in her skull - the desperation in the robot's mechanical voice, the way for half an instant, her eyes had widened when Pearl had struck the back of her head -  _as if she could feel..._

Pearl’s face ducked around the door, pale eyes strange and bright with excitement. Her body followed at a prowl, muscles tense and rippling under thin clothes – Blue didn’t blame her, it was stifling hot with the mustard yellow night pressing against the shattered window panes, sweat was on her skin, the smoke from outside draped her in gauze, like she was dancing again under the spotlights of their youth.

“Do you know what you’ve dropped in our lap, Blue?” Pearl stepped close, image flickering like a mirage. “That’s one of the old diamond line, in near mint condition! Once we get the blood off, of course. Oh, they were retired back in the Fifth Age, in and out of –“

Yellow interrupted rudely. “What I want to know is why and how it’s here!” She faced off against Pearl, and the light polished them ivory and gold. It was like gilding lilies. “What it wakes up and tries to hurt Blue?”

Pearl scowled, the bridge of her brow casting her eyes into shadow. She drew in a breath, and the steel great stairs suddenly drummed with booted feet. Guilty in the lurid light, the sisters froze, outlined in the spotlight with the darkness pulsing in the shadows sharp tipped around them.

The thunder of tapping footsteps halted, and silence built, as tense as a bowstring. A pause.

The door seemed to buckle in before the sound of the splintering crash reached the delicate shells of their ears. A cyclone of dust threw grit and oily roses in their eyes, hazing around the light. In matchsticks, the spine of the door buckled and broke as the Chief of the Peace, silhouetted in the doorway holding a glowing taser stepped crushingly forward. The charge units in her palms glowed, her visor gleamed.

“Garnet,” Pearl whispered. Her voice shook.


	5. Chapter 5

_Picture this._

_A staccato maze of stucco with walkways of corrugated iron belted between doors like eyes in the mustard-emerald sky sprawls over a dead earth thousands of kilometres below, poisonous canals of smog funnelling between the haystack buildings stretching towards the cleaner skies, a Venice of shadows and impure gas._

_Picture this._

_It is night and the Undersquarter is hazy with yellow smoke and the omnipresent puttering of gas machines. The buildings shake and groan on their moorings, ramshackle shanties leaning every which way with the occasional coloured lantern dim and confused in the smog._

_Picture this._

_One tower leans wildly to the side, creaking in the unsilent night, a red light shivering from a twisted stair-rail, a crumbling ruin of a half-collapsed wall shedding ugly light on the bloody, dusty stooped shoulders of a relic twice as old as the bricks it has crumbled. The door is gone, like a punched in fist, a broken bone._

* * *

The Chief of the Peace stood imposingly in the doorway. The red light from the toppled lantern illuminated her in bruiselike shades of red and purple, like the night sky sucked raw. Her fists were impressive works of metal, stubby synthetic fingers, each palm inset with a charge unit, one red, one blue. She wore a visor, low purple body-armour, and a careful air of tight control.

The Chief of the Peace’s head turned slightly as the implacable visor, glinting in the sharp light of the table lamp and backshaded by the softer, complimentary red lantern, scanned the room as if she were seeing it for the first time. Blue felt something in herself crumple into a small ball when the Chief of the Peace’s eyeless visor rested on her. It was not a threat, but Blue understood that nonetheless mentioning that she had seen Garnet here before was an unwise course of action.

“We have tracked an escaped automaton to this location,” said Garnet, massively. As she spoke, an inexplicable weightiness, solidity and ineffable purpose interrupted the room, as solemn and systematic as a funeral parlour. “It would be wise for you to step aside and allow us to search the building without interference.”

Two officers flanked her. One was nearly as pale as Pearl, but where Pearl was angular from months of scraped together credits and meals stretched too thin, this technician was almost plump, voluptuous, yet so pale that her synthetic skin looked greenish and the seamless ends where her flesh flowed into mechanics was tinted a deep prismatic jade. The other was huge and hulking and silent and her yellow eyes glittered like the halo that the shuttered private lanterns made in the Tiersquarter in the evenings. Her skin was banded orange and brown, like segments of bright fruit pushing up between splinters of sequoia bark. The pair of them seemed somehow unfinished next to the silent majesty of Garnet, who occupied the room like the extinguished heaviness of a black hole.

“There’s no need to search,” Yellow cried in a voice both sharp and acidic, “It just attacked my sister, right through there!”

Garnet’s officers exchanged a look and hurried in the direction the exasperated Yellow pointed, and a hushed gasp of amazement escaped from them when they saw the magnificent wreckage. If Blue tilted her head, she could glimpse it too – the enormous dusty blue robot covered in sagging blood streaked cloth, the splinters of the wall and the window. Yellowish smog with the thickness of brackish, swampy mud was eddying unconcerned through the broken wall, tainting the air. It was thicker in the Undersquarter, and Blue began to long for her scarf. Nonetheless, the green technician quickly set to work, plugging a unit into the back of the robot’s neck, almost exactly where Pearl had hit her, and began running diagnostics.

“I don’t know what it is, but it seems pretty shut down to me,” said the orange officer helpfully, looming in the doorway and watching the technician work. She was eyeing the motionless robot with the same caution Blue afforded a dangerous animal, tense and waiting for a fight. Blue had the feeling that relaxation was a concept foreign to the officer.

“Yes, _thank you,_ Jasper,” snapped the green technician, her cheeks flushing angrily under her visor, bunched up like an irate chipmunk.

“Peridot,” said Garnet. In one word, it seemed as if she had the power to stop the situation, stop the world on its axis, suggesting in a calm sort of way that was more of an order that they all rethink.

“It is secured, ma’am,” said the technician Peridot, cowed. “But I’ve never seen anything like this before. It really is an antique – it’s a wonder it works at all,” she added, a hint of snobby disgust creeping back into her voice.

Pearl was bursting to interfere, and at Peridot’s comment, the dam broke. “It’s one of the old Diamond line,” she corrected, “Industrials from the Fifth Era – they were discontinued after… too many accidents. I shut it down when it came in, there’s an override-”

Without entirely knowing how, Pearl appeared to become aware that Garnet was looking at her from behind the visor with disconcerting intentness, and went carefully quiet.

“But you’re human!” Peridot said too loudly, in disbelief.

Pearl levelled her gaze at her flatly. “Yes.” It was almost a bland statement, but rife with undercurrents.

Blue almost felt the strength of Yellow’s contemptuous glare. Pearl scowled back at her directly. Blue tugged miserably on her own sleeve and tried to hide her face under her hair.

Garnet nodded. Her gaze swept the room, committing each of them to memory exactly as they were. She stepped forward and picked up the door, fitting it carefully back into the bent jamb, surveyed her work, nodded again. Unhurriedly, she pulled out a chair from the table, and sat down without invitation.

The tense atmosphere immediately seemed to drain, like a lanced wound. Blue’s shoulders unknotted, and she relaxed her death grip on Yellow’s hand.  She didn’t remember when she had taken it, but Yellow didn’t seem to mind. They sank down again on the stained sofa. Only Pearl remained standing, her arms crossed over her chest, the picture of a reluctant and unwilling hostess.

“I think you’d best tell us what happened, starting with your names,” said Garnet.

Yellow seemed reassured, trusting in the authority in Garnet’s voice. Her eyes brightened with the pleasure of the infantile betrayals of siblinghood. After Garnet’s quiet gravitas, her snide voice sounded high and hysterical. “We are the Pearls,” she said, with a faded echo of grandeur. “Yellow, Blue, White.”

Blue felt compelled to curtsy, and curled her fingers into her palms until she felt the nails digging in instead.

Pearl’s face twisted in an odd grimace, something like hatred, envy or shame, or all three at once. “My name is Pearl Quartz,” she asserted. “I have nothing to do with you, any of you.”

“Either,” corrected Yellow in an ugly manner, “There's only two of us.”

Tension ballooned, as thick and turgid as the skin on rotting milk. Peridot whistled slowly between her teeth. She was sat back on her heels, fiddling with the disconnected fingers that floated from her enhancements. As one, all eyes turned to her with varying degrees of a sharp glare, save from Garnet, who remained unmoved. Peridot shrunk into herself, scolded.

“On scene questioning of Pearl Quartz, Yellow Pearl, and Blue Pearl,” said Garnet, as if recording. Her visor certainly looked enhanced. “You said that the automaton attacked your sister.” Her eyeless examination turned on Blue, as if she could see under her skin and into her head, at the pieces of darkness and the string of numbers that squirmed there.

 _33-55-67-11._ _Could Garnet see them tattooed on Blue’s brain, stark shapes, absolute, in the imagined font of her mother’s old handwriting, the calligraphy of theatre and stage groups?_

Blue fidgeted, and hid her eyes under a sheet of hair. Yellow’s fingers squeezed her arm comfortingly. Blue said nothing. Garnet’s stare burned.

“Yes,” Pearl said, as if a statement required confirmation, as if it had been directed at her. “Approximately two and half hours ago, I heard the sound of glass breaking, and the wall crashing in, and I saw the Diamond leaning down over Blue, so I grabbed my wrench and hit the override.”

“But it was not touching you in any way.”

“Well,” said Pearl, uncomfortably, “It was looming, threateningly.”

Peridot snickered and Jasper rolled her eyes.

“And you have seen this automaton before.” Garnet was still looking steadily at Blue, who trembled. Yellow answered this time, sharp with defence, half-interposing her shoulder between Garnet’s implacable stare and Blue’s pounding heart.

“Of course she hasn’t!” Yellow exploded, “Didn’t you say they were rare or something, Pearl?”

“The Diamond Line has been decommissioned for hundreds of years,” Pearl agreed uncertainly. “The only ones left are display pieces… curios, at best.” She turned to Yellow. “Like the one in Circle Plaza. I would have thought you’d have seen that, at least. It must be only an imitation made later, though, since this one is of quite a different design. And blue.” She jerked her chin towards the silent robot, almost disappointed by her musings.

Yellow bristled and gave her a look so bitterly sharp that it could flay the protective coating from a ship’s hull, but Pearl barely seemed to notice.

Blue was trapped under the silent judgement of the eyeless visor. Garnet’s body was utterly still. Blue could not shake the sense that Garnet already knew everything about their guilt and innocence, and was only waiting for them to walk into her trap. Garnet terrified her.

“You didn’t know that the automaton would murder its owner to find you,” Garnet said.

“Oh my _stars,”_ Yellow cried, and the colour drained from her sallow cheeks. She clutched onto Blue with histrionic horror.

Blue began to tremble. She tried to hide her shaking hands in her lap.

Garnet nodded, as if Blue’s lack of reaction had confirmed something absolutely. “It told you something.”

Blue looked into the depthless visor and very slowly, shook her head in the negative.

Garnet’s lips pursed, and Blue had the sense she was frowning. “That does not make sense,” Garnet allowed quietly.

“Nothing about this makes sense,” Jasper broke in. “Motionless for years, randomly breaks out and tracks down this kid for no reason?”

“There has to be a connection somewhere,” Peridot said, with the air of bestowing something incredibly obvious on Jasper. “Isn’t that right, Garnet?” In an instant, her self-important air turned anxious for reassurance.

Garnet watched the three of them levelly. “Perhaps,” she said. She stood and the room’s atmosphere reordered herself. “I am afraid that you will be coming with me.”

“What?” Pearl squawked.

“Stop overreacting, I’m sure they won’t _torture_ you,” Yellow snapped at Pearl.

Garnet looked at her. “All three of you.”

Yellow’s mouth closed with a snap. A horrified silence descended. Blue thought Garnet smiled.


	6. Chapter 6

_Picture this._

_Within the sprawling warren of the Hives, lights bob to and fro in a frantic fever, constantly spilling this way and that, the burble and murmur of conversations and sleeping children raising against the green-spangled yellow skies, the sensible redbrick walls dotted over with roundish holes and walkways of politely fenced tarmac. It is suburban and nearly calm, quiet is a privilege that the people living like ants in neatly trimmed boxes cannot afford so they grow limp flowers accustomed to living in translucent domes, like a world of soap bubbles and washing out to dry._

_Picture this._

_Lamplight spills redly over the upturned palms of blank machinery, human mind gone away, gone ahead. A room sits empty and deserted but for a rarely-used sofa and a dusty table piled with three nearly identical files, names scribbled on top, one crossed out. A visor gleams watchfully as the Chief of the Peace waits._

_Picture this._

_A rumpled bed squeezes in three refractions of the same rainbow, a Spartan bedroom with unquestioning silence written in the walls. The hubbub of the Hives reaches within this watchful room as distorted, jungle-voiced echoes. There is no window. It is dark._

* * *

 

In the aftermath of the questioning, Blue lay limply in the dark between her sisters. The bed was too small for all of them now, jam-cracked in to fit, matching ugly sores to half-healed scars. It would have fit years ago, when they could still fold in close like the matching things they had been made to be. Yellow and Pearl hissed insults over Blue’s head and Blue pretended to be deaf and silent until they went ashamedly mute, driven to awkwardness by her silence.

Garnet’s presence radiated between the walls. Sleepless, the Chief of the Peace sat unblinkingly at the table of her own home, her hands plugged into the only cooking appliance she owned, a dual-charger unit. Pearl’s apartment was still destroyed, and the three of them were still technically under police watch. Garnet had told them to stay in words phrased like a kind offer but implicit with order.

Yellow snored, now, raspily. Pearl was pretending to be asleep, her body taut as she tried to ascertain whether Blue slept. Blue was remembering.

“His name was Andrew de Mayo,” the detective had told Blue, “He was a volunteer curator in the museum not far from here. He had a pilot’s license. Could fly just about anything.”

Blue had said nothing. In the dark now, she did the same, nothing, a quietness, a stillness, a meek river stone in the placement of the river bed. Yellow’s head was on her shoulder. Pearl’s heart was waiting impatiently to run away again, this time with a stranger who needed no fixing at all, a stranger who wanted to fix her. Later, Blue resolved to think about the muddiness in themselves that attracted and repelled, like magnets, never free, never happy, around each other.

“From the looks of his house, he loved antiques,” the detective had continued. Her hair had shaded her flat eyes in angry navy-blues. She wore thin, pretty clothes, a cold glare, and a name badge that had said her name was Lapis Lazuli. There was ice in her teeth and snowmelt in her bones. She had stood and looked at Blue as if the shore had come to rest at her feet and Blue was the most disappointing offering she had ever seen.

Blue felt like seaweed in front of her, slimy and gasping for air, bladderack bloated. She felt like something dead now, exhausted, long-rotted, waiting for peace. No scavengers came to pick the bones that their past had left. Like the antiques de Mayo had loved, Blue’s best days had wilted and faded whilst she was busy performing her function, and now she gathered dust and waited for utility.

“Who’s going to look after those antiques now?” Lapis Lazuli had asked. “I’m told they need a lot of dusting. He’s dead because you woke that machine.”

The diamond was still in Pearl’s apartment, surrounded by broken masonry and shattered glass and police screens, covered in blood and dust and the exhaustion of a secret. Blue traced the shape of her synthetic face in her mind and thought about how the blood had only felt real and human when it covered the false skin of a machine. The string of numbers looped in her mind. Blue turned them over like a scratchy record and thought about the globe that had used to hang in her father’s office when they were children, peeling yellow, blue paint. The handle was gold inset with ivory, and Blue had had to turn it to watch the world rotate under her fingerprints, grid numbers scaling away in her mind.

Blue had stared down at her bitten nails instead of Lapis Lazuli and concentrated on feeling her hair tickle her ears, the plastic chair she sat on, the unused charge unit humming on the table. The accusations had burnt and bit deep. Lapis had leant against the pale yellow square of the screen that kept Blue in her cell, skin greenish and sick against its harshness.

“Andrew de Mayo,” repeated Lapis, now and then in Blue’s mind. “His friends would have called him Andy, if he had them. Who’s going to remember him now?”

Blue closed her eyes tight shut to block out the world, all of her world right here, the three of them with Yellow’s breath and Pearl’s oily perfume, and remembered. She remembered a childhood of circus lights, a triplet-act, smile for the camera,  _en pointe_ , the coming of the dark. She remembered drifting around Yellow’s too small apartments in Circle, she remembered the antiques shop with the diamond enshrouded in the back. But no matter how much she tried, all she could remember of the owner was a blond balding pate bent over a countertop, the suggestion of a whisky-cigars stench.

And now he was dead.

Pearl expelled a soft, nervous breath, and wriggled in the covers, the essence of life, the primal drive. She slipped from the bed as smoothly as a knife between ribs, or a lover into the body of their beloved, a practised movement. Then she flitted away, her lithe body blocking out the red, red light shining from the room in which Garnet sat, waiting, unresting. Listening, Blue’s hands slowly tightened into fists in the dusty sheets.

“Pearl Quartz,” Garnet rumbled.

“It hardly seems fair that you know my second name and you haven’t returned the favour,” Pearl challenged.

“Crystal.” Garnet’s voice held a smile.

“Garnet Crystal,” said Pearl, coquettish now. “Would you like to dance with a criminal?”

The low chuckle Garnet offered in response was accompanied by a shuffle of footsteps and the click of a door. Garnet’s presence left with her, as if the last light had suddenly gone out of a dark room, plunging it into unforeseen pitch blackness, as if the moon had been suddenly extinguished behind the clouds in the midst of a thunderstorm.

Blue was unsurprised by the swell of bitterness that roared up as the dark flooded in. Yellow’s beating heart and snuffling breath was the last nightlight against the darkness, but they weren’t enough alone. The darkness was a battering river, and Blue was nothing but a little grey pebble, all her edges and her fight worn away. Pearl had created herself a dam out of stubbornness, played in the still waters beyond the rapids that consumed her sisters.

Pearl had a history of leaving them to drown. Yellow had learnt how to swim, but Blue had only held her breath and let the current carry her somewhere deeper and darker, underneath the sea where the distant surface shone the colour of the diamond robot’s eyes, and Blue remembered, remembered. 

 _33-55-67-11._ Blue’s fists unclenched as she remembered the numbers. She turned them over in her mind, trying to put them together, figure out what code the robot had killed to tell her. Not  _33556711._  The pauses were implicit in the weighty breaths between each number. Blue tapped them into a rhythm against her leg. It hit her, suddenly, with the force of a waterfall slamming onto her spine.

Blue’s eyes flew open into the crushing river of the darkness, and she gasped for breath. She was going to need a map.


	7. Chapter 7

_Picture this._

_A ghost slips into a dead man’s shop, drifting down dusty racks of antiques, slips a stolen roll of paper into her arms, wriggled from a stack of maps just like it, the names of places and joys of discovery inked into fading paper, tight-rolled against the exposure of dullness and daylight. Sunlight ruins everything, so the ghost with the powder-blue hair and healed cut on her hand slips through at night._

_Picture this._

_The unfriendliness of the rocking trains jams together politely rude people, metal ribbing poking softer flesh, charge units wearily flashing and gleaming, mustard yellow gas pressing against the reinforced windows hungrily, waiting to chew and claw at the eyes and lungs, but no one cares about a roll of crumbling paper and no one cares about a ghost in blue._

_Picture this._

_Undersquarter is dead and ratty-silent, poor hurrying with heads bowed and scarfs pressed thick over mouths and eyes like muffling shrouds, the ones they will be wrapped in and dropped to the sinking graveyard that Cygni stands on, its elevated towers ever trying to outrun the gas without confronting the foundations. There is a blood-splatter path marked by swept dust and ugly footprints sunken into crumbling stone. A ghost echoes along in the path of the murderer and pauses at the blown out step, the extinguished red light, the yellow scarf, folded limply over railings, forgotten and faded._

* * *

 

Blue tried not to breathe, tried not to think, tried not to feel. She had sunken deep in herself somewhere, determined to find an echo of rightness in the desolation of meaninglessness that had been everything she had gone here to escape. Blue was good at being soft and silent and unnoticed, giving way, crumbling before her louder, more vibrant sisters, letting their sparkle overfly her naptha-steadiness. _Dependable_ , Mother had said once, of Blue, a meek little shade of grey pebble, edges and catches worn away, worn pleasant.

So when she whispered past the police tape with a stolen map in her arms it was silent, preparatory for the kickback her sisters would make, a prelude, a prologue to their greater story. Everything was as they had left it – the table light still glared whitely at the ramshackle walls, unkindly illuminating spots of dirt. Pearl’s welder was tucked indiscreetly in a stack of leaking rubber tubes. The door to Blue’s room hung open like a curious mouth. The shape of the robot was visible, a shadow slipped against the wall, pressing darkness to plaster like paint.

Blue walked in and looked up. The robot’s face was in shadow, her body was a sloping arc of spine and slumped shoulders. She looked wrung-out, tired, waiting. There was something watchful in the hulk, though Blue knew that she wasn’t registering anything. _She – not it,_ there was something personable in the mechanic hulk, though it was synthetic – the robot’s bloody hands and flesh-rubbed cheeks had only felt human when they touched Blue, impossibly huge yet taking care to be delicate. The diamond industrials, Pearl had called them – things made big and heavy to be worked, yet their designers had taken time to add beauty. Pearl would have asked why.

Blue lifted the veil away from the robot’s face and stretched up to touch her cheek. She had to climb onto the robot’s lap to do it, the cold rubbery synthetic flesh yielding against her hand. Blood flakes drifted off. Somewhere, a hum echoed inside the robot’s core, and Blue heard a faint ticking start. A series of minute clicks and whirrs followed, and then the robot’s head straightened and her eyes opened, glowing bright again like dawn over the mountains. The robot blinked and its pupils refocused to stare straight at Blue.

Blue swallowed, and sat down on the robot’s lap, the roll of dusty paper over her knees.

Not 33-55-67-11. She recognised the drumbeat of the numbers. They were the Pearls, engineered to have music pulsing in their organic hearts and navigation had its own rhythm.

Not 33-55-67-11, but 33 by 55. 67 by 11. A numerical grid reference. It had to be. Nothing else made sense, unless it was some sort of contact number – or serial number…

Blue unrolled the map and ghosted her fingers over the small, squiggly lines of the grid dividing old Cygni IV into squares, before the wasted earth had been left long behind. 33. Blue’s finger found it, paused, and then scaled up the grid. 33 by 57. Blue circled the square. She took the ruler and divided the highlighted section into smaller squares. 67 by 11. She drew a little diamond in the indicated patch.

It could have been anything, if Blue allowed herself to think about it, but she seized, with the terrible timidity of a stone washed clean of her edges, onto the possibility of a destination. There was a location – something that the robot had kept hidden in her lips for years, something that Blue had triggered when she had woken the robot. It had to be.

The diamond’s shadow was huge and hulking, and her eyes guttered like flames. Her noble face held an irrepressible sadness. The blood had dried, and was peeling in rusty flakes off her skin, like age-spots. Blue turned around the map and held it up. The diamond’s hand raised, a soft, nearly inaudible ticking following the movement. It was bigger than Blue’s entire body, but she reached out and put a hand on the nail, the diamond’s fingertip blotting out half the map but resting, surely, on the exact pinpointed location of the grid reference she had given Blue.

She had been right, Blue thought, with tremendous victory. The river of darkness surrounding the sulphurous night seemed no longer crushing – the tiny riverstone had bobbed, against all odds, onto a beach. There was something that the robot – or whomever had wrote that code into her – wanted Blue to find.

Then her hand curled sideways, and cupped Blue into her palm. Surprised, Blue went, tumbling onto her knees into the huge palm, flakes of blood and dust staining her skirt. Her heart jerked in absent fear, but all the diamond did was curl her fingers carefully around Blue and blink, one eyelid half a second slower than the other. Slowly, with the grind of ancient gears, the ground began to slide away from Blue, the diamond’s spine straightening, legs lifting, until she was at her full, huge height, Blue held as tiny and insignificant as a river-stone on her palm.

Blue rested her hands against the synthetic skin of the diamond’s thumb. The diamond looked down at her, with great, cerulean blue eyes that were unstoppable and remote and inhuman, but not quite inhumane, asking permission.

“Who’s going to remember him now?” Lapis had asked. Who was going to think about de Mayo, who had had nothing and no one but his dust and his planes, now that he was gone?

Heart in her throat, Blue nodded. The diamond’s head lifted with a grinding sound, and she took her first, jarring step, away from the city, away from Blue’s sisters, away from the pounding river of life in which Blue existed as something meek and smoothened, unobtrusive, towards the ancient beacon of the mysterious grid reference, hidden far away on Cygni IV’s strangled surface. The huge shape of the decommissioned robot with a human in its hand disappeared from the silence of the crumbled apartment block naturally within the thick yellow smog. It went unremarked and unreported in the heavy heat of the night.


End file.
